Here's the sad news on economics and newspapers

Bob Herbert will always be in the running for a Pulitzer Prize. But he'll never be nominated for a Nobel Prize in economics.

At the end of a recent appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, the New York Times columnist was told by host Joe Scarborough that his company needed to start charging a subscription fee for its Web site.

"But we'll lose readers," replied Herbert.

And there, my friends, is the handbasket into which newspapers are going to hell.

The distinguishing trait of the Old Testament's chosen people was that they ignored their many prophets. The distinguishing trait of today's journalists is that they ignore their lack of profits.

Can the Babylonians be far behind?

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, the former public affairs officer at Fort Drum, tells the best story that predicted the free press's pending free fall.

When Hilferty taught English at West Point, Cadets were required to read the New York Times, and thus each was given a copy of the paper every morning. But when the Times replicated its paper for free on its Web site, Cadets were told to read the paper online.

"On that one day, West Point canceled 4,000 subscriptions," said Hilferty, who didn't need a math degree to figure out that nothing from nothing — even if it is from West Point — still equals nothing.

Readers. But not subscribers. Readers. But not advertisers. Shoot, I majored in English too, and I know that "free" is not a business model.

Take the Watertown Daily Times, literally. We sell fewer papers than ever before. Our top circulation 15 years ago was 44,000. We are below 28,000 now, although we go well above 30,000 in the summer.

But readers? We have more readers than ever before. On just one day recently we had more than 130,000 unique visitors on our Web site. We could never generate that many readers with just our newspaper.

Herbert's column is being read by more people today than he could have ever fathomed when he joined the Times in 1993. Yet the paper that carries "All the news that's fit to print" is in financial trauma.

As the New York Times itself reported last fall, "Print ad sales and circulation continue to drop, while online advertising has yet to make up for the lost revenues. Meanwhile, The Times announced over the past month that it will combine sections of the paper to save money, as well as shutter a distribution subsidiary."

But you didn't need me to tell you that; you can find the story yourself online and read it for free.

Free, that is, in the sense that no money exchanged hands between you and the New York Times. To read it, you likely own a computer that cost you more than $1,000 and you are paying close to $500 a year if you have high-speed Internet service through Time Warner.

And there is your basic conundrum. The public is willing to spend money on cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys, etc., and on service contracts to read all about it, but when it comes to the production of a news product, many believe it should be a free service — like downloading movies and music.

If all the advertising one finds in a newspaper could migrate to a newspaper's Web site, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Remove the expense of running a press room, buying newsprint and ink, and door-to-door delivery, and you've got yourself a winner.

But advertising isn't relocating to newspaper Web sites quickly enough, and with the economic downturn, ad revenue is dropping while workers compensation and pension costs are rising.

The New York Times and others saw nothing wrong years ago with allowing aggregate sites to link to their work for free. Now, they are realizing this mistake and want to put the revenue genie back in the bottle and are considering charging for online news.

Which is fine with us. We were often a lone voice crying in the wilderness when we created the subscription-based site WatertownDailyTimes.com years ago. And I couldn't count the number of people who said, "I can get the New York Times for free and you're charging me $79 a year? Why are you gouging people?"

Well, you can still get the non-gouging New York Times online for free, but the product is only in existence because a Mexican billionaire resuscitated the company in January with a $250 million investment.

As I said, free is not a business model.

Seven years ago in this column, I wrote the following: "While most newspaper sites are free, they won't be for long." OK, so I was a little off on the date. But not the direction.

The world is slowly inching toward our thinking. The question is whether Americans are willing to pay journalists to gather, provide and — through archives — preserve news, features and sports.

(To save money, the Times is considering handing over our sponsorship of the annual north country spelling bee to newzjunky.com, a local aggregate Web site. We'll then pray that none of the contestants is asked to spell "news.")

While the Watertown Daily Times is more financially secure than our larger brothers and sisters that are in bankruptcy court, we are not immune to community indifference. There is no reason the north country can't lose its newspaper as well.

All it will take is for north country citizens to accept a revamp of the New York Times's slogan: "All the free links to press releases that fit our government's agenda."

Bob Gorman is managing editor of the Times.